PROFILE: KENGO KUMA
THE CELEBRATED JAPANESE ARCHITECT AND CULTURAL WARRIOR DRAWS ON HIS PAST TO EDUCATE AND INTRIGUE ON THE GLOBAL STAGE.
The celebrated Japanese architect and cultural warrior educates and intrigues on the global stage
In the tectonic feast that is modern Tokyo, the architecture of Kengo Kuma is akin to sushi. It is quintessentially Japanese, draws on centuries of tradition, appeals to global tastes, combines fresh ingredients in compact form and leaves you hungry for more. “[It] is a good metaphor for my architecture,” said Kuma in a 2008 interview with the UK’s Architects’ Journal. “If the journey of the ingredients is too long, the taste of the sushi is compromised. That program of using local material in season is the secret of good taste and the secret of my style.” And that non-objective style, while always privileging material and seeking to recover a sense of “Japanese-ness”, successfully expresses in such other-worldly architecture as the Great Bamboo Wall in Beijing — a villa near the Great Wall of China that abstracts structure into the built ambiguity of a bamboo grove. Its alternating play of concealing and revealing through canes of locally grown bamboo relies on a unique alchemy of matter, master-craft and ma — the Japanese word that roughly translates to the pure pause between the parts of a structure. Unlike his compatriot architect Tadao Ando, whose stark concrete geometries seek ma by formalist means, Kuma, the anti-objective framer of nature, explores emptiness as a bridge to the ephemeral. For him, space is not a construct with boundaries but a conscious state, the elucidation of which lies in the experiences of his youth. Kuma was born in 1954 in Yokohama, an exposed port city on Tokyo Bay that was twice levelled last century — first, by the tsunami ensuing from the Great Earthquake in 1923; second, by the US fire bombings of 1945. Within this landscape of ruin and resurrection, he was raised in one of the few traditional timber-framed houses to survive both disasters. Kuma, who would later major in architecture at the University of Tokyo and study at Columbia University in New York, serially recalls its sensory impact on his psyche. “I am a product of the place — of the house and its natural environment,” he said in a 2015 interview. “The satoyama in our backyard was mostly bamboo thicket. I used to tread on the ground where the bamboos were growing and feel the aroma from their leaves.” His recollections of that satoyama (the zone between mountain foothills and flat land) would materialise decades later in the bamboo-edged entry to the Nezu Museum, the Kuma-reconstructed institution housing traditional Asian art. It is the ascetic full stop at the end of an upscale Tokyo street filled with ebullient flagships by Pritzker laureates (architecture’s highest honour). All around grabs for the sky and the eye, but the Nezu hunkers in with humility — its massive roof blade referencing the rural structures of regional Japan, where Kuma spent a decade after the asset-bubble burst of 1992 closed his Tokyo practice. “I worked in the countryside and started to collaborate with the local craftsmen,” he said in a 2005 interview. “I learned many things from these carpenters. Now I want to recover the Japanese tradition, not of ‘monuments’ but of ‘weaker’ buildings.” Kuma’s resolve to recover the essence and richness of that Japan was further strengthened after the earthquake and tsunami of 2011, a disaster with a damage estimate of 25 trillion yen (around $420 billion). “When I saw the tsunami washing away those American-style houses and cars, Noah’s flood came to mind,” he wrote in the preface to Kenneth Frampton’s 2013 monograph Kengo Kuma Complete Works. “The earthquake and tsunami seemed to me an expression of the anger of the gods at the way all of us had forgotten or ignored the fearsome power of nature.” Investing evermore humility in his design hand, Kuma is ironically now contending with a scale of commission that ranges from a solid silver tea service for Georg Jensen (selling for around $100,000) to Tokyo’s new National Stadium — site of the 2020 Olympics and the source of major controversy after the late Zaha Hadid’s winning scheme was ousted in 2015 by Japan’s prime minister Shinzo Abe. The one project that is his out- of-reach dream is the rebuild of Tokyo “with the streets, trees, all on a human scale”. But, until nature or human idiocy oblige with the blank urban canvas, the architect is getting busy delivering his first Australian building — a six-storey, mixed-use ‘sushi’ that will nourish the life of Sydney’s Darling Square. VL Visit kkaa.co. jp.
“Using local material in season is the secret of good taste and the secret of my style”